Our Endless Numbered Days
by Juggerknot17
Summary: "Everything that I felt, I could only pour it into five words -'You. Are. Not. Leaving. Me.'" All the reasons why Ian wouldn't let Wanda go, all the reasons he couldn't let her go.
1. Passing Afternoon

**Named after the Iron and Wine album. Probably going to name the chapters after the songs, make some lyric references.  
>So, watch out for the lyrics of each song. And listen to them, of course! They're beautiful.<strong>

* * *

><p><strong>Passing Afternoon<strong>

There are times that walk from us like some passing afternoon. Times when we're rarely aware that our clock is ticking, and times like that will never last forever. Times we don't realize that 'too good to be true' is something real. Times when we are weak.

Times when we've mustered up the last bit of happiness inside us, and it all comes down in unreconcilable shrapnels.

I knew the end was inevitable. But I hadn't quite imagined the end to be like this. I hadn't even imagined having all this. I hadn't imagined ever achieving something so impossible. I hadn't imagined myself befriending her, loving her, or being by her side.

My obsession with her was beyond my notice, and before I had even realized, I'd fallen into a hole of a world that I judged too harshly to explore. And I knew that I belonged to her because she opened my mind to a world I never would have known about if it weren't for her existence – she opened my eyes, she opened my heart.

So it seems it's an endless cycle of what goes around, comes around. I screwed with the way of the world. I guess I deserved the screwing back. This is the price I had to pay for wanting what I should not have touched in the first place. I should not have wanted her so badly. I should have killed her when I had laid eyes on her the first time.

The pain wouldn't be as great.

Better I'd be labeled a murderer than endure this ache. Better she'd be dead and I'd never met her.

But in that split second, horror washed through me.

_Where would I be without her? Where would everyone be without her? Jamie would have died, Walter would be in pain, the caves would be the same._

_I would be the same._

It was too hard to make sense of the world, or make sense of what I felt – it was a mixture of anger, frustration, and pure devastation. I could already feel my tethers to my small happy world drift away, like our endless, numbered days. Everything that I felt, I could only pour it into five words.

"You. Are. Not. Leaving. Me."


	2. Sodom, South Georgia

**Sodom, South Georgia**

My birthday was probably the only day anyone saw anything out of the ordinary in Sodom. Thank God, it always fell in Spring Break. Sodom, South Georgia was the central headquarters of all things dead and boring. No one bothered to take down the Christmas lights or made an effort on their border flowers. _There ain't no point cleaning up a town buried in Christmas bows or a blanket of weeds_, they said. _Nasty O'Shea kids all over my lawn_. _Run off before I call the cops._

That never scared me. The cops were too obese from buying out all the stale donuts from Krueger's.

You see, my birthday was the only day anyone in this zombie town even bothered to lift a finger to ruin my day. It was nuts, and I loved it. Our neighbours hated us, and took it out on Kyle and I. My mailbox was usually inundated with birthday cards other than the usual, "_Your hulky kids trashed my bike. Screw you" _or _"This is the seventeenth soccer ball through my window. That'll be a hundred bucks."_

Once the neighbours went to the lengths of flattening my tires. Then on my fourteenth birthday Jodi threw me a '50s themed birthday party. That was maybe the only party ever thrown in the history of Sodom. Kyle left me my present on the counter this morning. Socks. Again. With a birthday message, same as ever.

_Happy Birthday, bro. 19 is such a lame number. Make it cooler._

I wore my new socks, like always, made myself some waffles, like always, reassured Jodi that Kyle would stop being an asshole about something something, like always, told my mother to 'relax' regardless of her mood or whether it would help at all, like always, and replied to Lisa Farmington for the umpteenth time saying, no, we were not getting back together, like always.

And I wished – I wished, I really wished, the rest of the day would go like it did, like always. I wished I wouldn't have to see what was real, take truth for what it was, and lose the 'like always' 'agains' and the rest of everything that was once a part of my everyday-dead-and-boring-Sodom life. I wished, I wished, I wished, and that's when I really came out of my boyhood and realized wishes don't come true. Nineteen, and I was on the run, on the fringes of embracing adulthood. Nineteen with so many roads ahead. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. I had a map laid out in my mind, when I was a child, of what I would be doing at those ages, but the plans never really fell through.

Nineteen, and I saw Papa die smiling, happy to have been free of Sodom's tedious ways and unchanging weather. That's what I believed until Mama started spouting nonsense about parasites in our neighbour's garden. I told Mama the weeds never got pulled, but there was more, and I wouldn't listen. My normal had life had felt endless, infinite and everlasting, but those weeks, those horrid, horrid weeks, I could do nothing but count 'til the end of break when I finally believed. That if I went back to my friends, there would be no point, because they would no longer be my friends.

My denial made me lose so much I had loved. _They _made me lose so much I had loved, the pesky parasite species. Papa killed himself the day after my birthday, right after the neighbours brought us pie. They never brought us anything. When I ran to the mailbox, after putting on my socks, and finishing my 'like always' rituals, I found them. I found them. The dinner party invites that would make Papa kill himself.

It wasn't just the neighbours or the invites or the pie. He saw it, he saw all of it before we saw it, and before he left us for good, he met a man, a crazy man, who said the same things Mama said. About this new parasite in the gardens. Apparently it wasn't just boring old Sodom.

He left us things, aside from his crazy-old-man-babble-talk. Theories, directions, questions to ponder, answers to look for, that we never honestly found.

Soon, it wasn't just Papa. A lot of people saw it, before Kyle and I started to believe it. I could blame Sodom all I wanted for being oblivious of the attack, for not caring about a single life it ruined, for giving me a life I liked, only to take it away. Sodom slept through every Christmas, but I never cared for its attitude. Not until Sodom slept through the attack, slept on an acre of bones.

I could blame my small-town suburban life, and all the ungrateful people that were linked to it, but the truth is that Sodom became a more-dead-than-usual, abandoned town because the parasites killed it. Killed it with fear. They ran almost like I did, maybe to a happier place, where they never had to live with the fear of being followed, hunted, robbed of their control, their minds, their bodies.

And after watching so much death, facing so much loss, I can't. I still can't bring myself to give her up. Not for my 'like always' life. Not even for a town full of people. Not for Papa, Mama, Jodi and definitely not Lisa Farmington. All my regrets crumbled, because I found her.

Because she gave me some things Sodom never could.  
>Salvation. Kindness. Truth. Acceptance.<br>Love.

Maybe she didn't love me like I loved her, but I sure did feel loved.  
>She made me feel so loved, that I didn't care that this was my only life, and her last. Didn't care that my life with her would one day reach a number nineteen.<br>Didn't care that our days were numbered, because I was so intoxicated by her presence, that it seemed endless.

Time is something that you wait to finish you off, in captivity. Time is all you think of, and time becomes all you are. A set of eyes in space and time. It's what you count and anticipate. Time is what I forgot, with her.

And that is why I knew that I couldn't let her leave.

* * *

><p><strong>I think you all would agree that Ian O'Shea is better left a mystery so hopefully, no more back-stories. This update is crazy late, and you all have Andrew Niccol to thank for. Mixed feelings on the movie, but it got me back into the fandom. Thinking of becoming more regular.<strong>

**Also, this is so, so, different from my original plan. I'll see how it goes. Rambling rambling rambling. Bye, now.**


	3. Radio War

**Radio War**

Was I happy while on the run? Obviously not. But was I sad? That's not true either. I was insentient. Between grief and nothing, I just took nothing.

It was easier to survive when ethics became irrelevant. My first kill wasn't as difficult. I was only guided by a modicum of pride of still being able to think my own thoughts. I wouldn't call it an entirely shitty existence. There's a certain kind of satisfaction that comes to you, when you wake up another day, and know that you're still you. Only in this kind of world. I never took that for granted, so there wasn't much else I needed. I was too busy surviving this war.

It wasn't even really a war. They'd wiped us out in our sleep. They won even before we knew there was anything to win. Now, there was only evasion. Lifelong, never ending, and incessant trepidation. A tiresome and cyclical affair of waking up, replenishing, waiting for nightfall, stealing, killing, replenishing, sleeping, waiting. What were we waiting for? I didn't know then.

When I would wait for Kyle in the mornings, I would tune in on the radio; they hardly ever played music on there, anymore. Sometimes, I would catch snippets of Nat King Cole. A lot of elevator music. Sometimes, things I didn't recognize, and words I didn't understand at all. There were voices I knew, but songs I'd never heard before. probably the aliens taking over the industry. I never really tuned in for entertainment; no human ever would.

There were broadcasts. Seekers here, humans there. She died, he lived. Another fucking parasite among us; safe, secure, happy. "I couldn't believe it the first time I saw it," some surviving parasitic damzel in distress or the other would exclaim. "There was a time I pitied them; but they can't be tamed!"

_Tamed_.

There were other words; wild and savage being the most prevalent. Everyday they gave me new reasons to hate them. Vengeance was all Kyle lived for. He thought he could live to see them die out. Some government body that had a plan. I was at one with these misleading ideas; at the time they were conciliatory. At the time, the past still mattered. It was quite early on.

We let go of it as soon as we made it to the third state.

It was harder on Kyle than it was on me. He had someone he thought he was responsible for. Somebody that made him whole. I let him mourn her, but I didn't fully understand why it took as long as it did. He slept with a gun by his "bed" and a letter she wrote while she was still herself. Eventually, I realized the gun wasn't for precaution.

And then, he would take one good look at me, and he knew he couldn't have used it on anything else other than a parasite. Both of us would have decided to just say goodnight like our father, if we hadn't had each other.

In time we found Jeb. Well, he found us. He was listening to the radio war. We were sighted. We got ourselves out, and resorted to the only place that would shelter us. The barren wastelands of Arizona. We took a chance. Jeb was a friend of our father's. He was there, months before we realized the end was near, warning us. Trying to help us.

And we made it, to our new underground home. Our band of humans that refused, just like us. I was convinced it was lucid dreaming. There was a _bathing _room. With actual _hot water_. If you haven't been near civilization for years, it's hard not to figure this to be some sort of twisted fantasy with a terrible end. These luxuries become more alien to you than the parasites.

So, I waited for the nightmarish end. This place made me hopeful, sure, but I wouldn't recover from what I'd become. The radio war would never end in this life. So, I was on guard. Something bad would happen. It always did. And when it did, it wouldn't phase me. It gave my life new purpose, this waiting. Knowing what to wait for. I bided my time, prepared for it.

It's hardly a nightmare if it doesn't take you by surprise.

This is it. This, my nightmare. This, right now. Her begging me to stop, while those stupid torturous hurtful words reverberate in my mind. "I have to go, Sunny, just like you. I have to give my body back, too."

We were all waiting; some us for a quiet death, some of us for victory, some of us for something nebulous, unknown, a beast never seen.

I never knew I was waiting for her. For her to ruin me from the inside, to pick up the pieces, put me back together, and to ruin me in a completely new way.

The greatest nightmare is when you think the dream's over; it's drained you.  
>Crushed you.<br>Taken everything.  
>Every last bit.<br>And then you put your guard down, think it's over.

But it never is.

* * *

><p><strong>Well, I found a my battered copy of the Host last night. Then this monster was born. I realized I started writing this when I was 13! I had a <strong>penchant for melodrama back then; I still kind of do, but the most of the angstyness has faded by now. You might sense the change, but all rest assured, I know where this is going. The past 4 years also gave me a lot more perspective.<strong>**


End file.
